Razorpay says BHIM has highest share in merchant UPI transactions

In what might point to a larger share for Bharat Payments Interface (BHIM) app in Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions by merchants, payment services provider Razorpay on Tuesday said 48% of its UPI transactions come from BHIM.

The numbers put out by Razorpay suggest that BHIM may still hold the pole position where it matters most – merchant payments. Between September 2017 and February 2018, BHIM’s share oscillated between 38% and 52%. (Reuters)

In what might point to a larger share for Bharat Payments Interface (BHIM) app in Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions by merchants, payment services provider Razorpay on Tuesday said 48% of its UPI transactions come from BHIM. As per data released by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), BHIM accounted for about 5.8% of overall UPI volumes, which includes both peer-to-peer (P2P) and peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions. Trailing BHIM was Flipkart-owned PhonePe, with 19% of UPI transactions on Razorpay, followed by Google Tez (14%), ICICI Bank’s app (7%) and Paytm (5%). Harshil Mathur, co-founder and chief executive officer, Razorpay, told FE the fintech company has 60,000 merchant partners, of whom 12,000 use its services for receiving UPI payments. “All the transactions we see are P2M. BHIM has not been doing a lot of cashbacks and incentives. When you do those, P2P transactions go up because it’s free to move money around,” Mathur said, adding, “P2M transactions constitute actual usage because you are using your money to buy a product or service. There you see BHIM driving a good chunk of the volume.”

Earlier this month, Paytm said it accounted for 40% of all UPI transactions in February and claimed to have upstaged Google India’s Tez app by clocking the highest number of UPI transactions. Till the launch of Tez in September 2017, BHIM used to account for about 45% of all UPI transactions by volume, followed by PhonePe, which contributed another 40%. BHIM saw a further erosion of share as Paytm launched UPI payments in November 2017. The numbers put out by Razorpay suggest that BHIM may still hold the pole position where it matters most – merchant payments. Between September 2017 and February 2018, BHIM’s share oscillated between 38% and 52%.

Ditto for PhonePe. In November 2017, PhonePe, had told FE it was comfortably placed in the merchant payments space. “We don’t bother much about market share today. For what it’s worth, though, we had over 70% market share of all merchant transactions on UPI in November,” Sameer Nigam, PhonePe co-founder and chief executive, had said.